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Breaking the email addiction

“Engagement Marketing: Strategies for Conversion and Ongoing Customer Retention” is what it said in the programme.

It sounded safe enough, but as I delivered this presentation at Internet World last month, I wondered if the subject headings on Lines, Crunch, Breaking Habits and a 7 Step Programme (combined with some slightly edgy last minute PowerPoint images) were starting to make it sound more like a discourse on drug rehabilitation than on email marketing!

I am addicted to these ‘lines’ though, I admit it! The traditional marketing paradigm of a horizontal line separating advertising and direct marketing is now better described in the digital era as a vertical line.

Acquisition is on the left, Retention is on the right and line between them is the point of Conversion. I’ve blogged on this before.

The ‘Habit’ reference was about breaking the cycle of acquiring the same customer over and over again.

This, like any good drug habit, is easily addictive but damaging to the (financial) health of any company (except of course the media owner providing the customer acquisition).

The Steps (all seven of them) outlined the actions you can take to ensure customers come back for more – without Google or your affiliate marketing company’s intervention.

Thinking about it, if you consider the low cost, high ROI and ‘turn on a pin’ qualities of email marketing, addictive tendencies are likely to manifest themselves in digital marketers everywhere.

“We are not ambulance chasers, people leave our stores empty handed every day and we don’t feel the need to beg them to come back so why should online be any different?”

If anyone takes the time to read these words, I would love your feedback. RedEye has a series of clients that make a hell of a lot of money and ROI from behaviourally targeted and automated emails.

But we were blown away recently when a prospect said that they would never do trigger emails or basket abandonment work because they perceived it as the e-marketing equivalent of ‘ambulance chasing’!? Ouch!!

We’re in the land of startups this week, spending a day in the life of Ann-Marie Rossiter, Head of Marketing at events marketplace HeadBox. As usual, we’ll be finding out what it takes to succeed in this role, from skills and tools to the daily routine. If you’d like to appear in this feature, get […]